Operational Professionalism

[Daniel Murphy]

"Mike"  wrote in message news:ncdrqamncpbgfltaqrqe at forum.dlang.org...
> This is exactly what I'm talking about.  You claim to know what is and 
> isn't deprecated, but others in this community have stated otherwise.  How 
> do you know? You got the information from somewhere, where did you get it?

Reading this newsgroup, discussion on github, and bugzilla.

> Perhaps these features are not "deprecated", but "discouraged".  We need 
> to know that too.

Many many features have been proposed for deprecation.  Most of those 
discussions have gone nowhere.  Different people have different ideas about 
what should be discouraged.

eg foreach_reverse

> I'm in the process of modelling a 1500 page MCU datasheet in D.  Each 
> field in each register is modeled with an "alias" statement. There will be 
> several hundred of these when I'm done.  I already went down one path 
> based on the documentation.  Then the community told me it was deprecated 
> and I should go the other way.

The community was wrong, it is not deprecated.  The new syntax is generally 
preferred because it is easier to read etc

> So, I submitted a pull request to update the documentation, and it was 
> merged.
>
> I was even going to take on the task of modifying the D Runtime to use the 
> supposedly "new" syntax, in an effort to be helpful.  Now I'm not so sure 
> I should.

Updating the documentation to reflect best practices is always useful. 
Changing existing code is less of a sure thing, although in this case I 
doubt you'd get much opposition.  If you're worried about wasting your time 
with a pull request that gets rejected, start with one file and see if 
there's any interest from those with commit access.

> I also began building a class hierarchy based on the new(...) and 
> destroy(), based on the documentation.  Only to find a day or so ago that 
> new(...) is discouraged/deprecated.

Unlike many of the officially deprecated features, this one is pretty easy 
to ignore and doesn't seem to cause any bugs.  This makes deciding what to 
do with it rather unimportant.

So, it has an uncertain future and questionable value, and this would 
probably mean a pull request using this in phobos would not be accepted. 
You can still do whatever you like in your own code.

> I don't really like updating the GDC wiki, migrating its bug reports, or 
> submitting pull request to fix DLang.org documentation, but I did/do it 
> because I care and I want these efforts to succeed.

The great thing about being a volunteer is that you can work on the things 
you care about, and nothing else.  The situation improves by more people 
caring about the documentation, not by insisting that the people who don't 
care work on it too.

Andrei declaring we should spend effort on different areas is only binding 
for the non-volunteers, although it does help the community know that effort 
in those areas is desired.